Skepticism/Denial - General

BiteSome skeptics view climate science as a house of cards. You pull one card from the bottom and the whole thing collapses. But science is more like a jigsaw puzzle, assembled piece by piece over decades of research. Gradually, the overall picture emerges, until it's unmistakable. Remaining gaps or...

Bite"Skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method. But an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts. These deniers are largely impervious to facts — at least facts that contradict their worldview."

Bite"When I was six years old, there were conflicting theories about how babies were born. Somebody said a stork brought them. Another guy said your parents bought them at the hospital. Another said girls had some kind of flap between their legs that babies came out of, and something about penises.
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BiteWould you trust Joe Camel to teach science to your children? Even lifelong smokers don't want Joe near their kids. The tobacco industry pioneered modern disinformation to discredit medical research. Now some "skeptics" use the same tactics to discredit climate science.

Bite"Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That's all she is. You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate"
"Mother Nature alwa...

BiteBlaming Exxon "is like blaming a raccoon for going through your trash. They’re simply responding to available opportunities." Their "multi-billion dollar investment" in Arctic seabed exploration "is predicated on Exxon’s belief that the planet is warming. . . is one of the most powerful admissions...

BitePartial evidence can be very misleading. Remember the "blind men feeling an elephant" allegory? One feels a leg and says it's a tree. Another the trunk; i'ts a snake! Another pats the body and calls it a wall. The only way to figure out what's really going on is to look all the evidence together...

Bite"We desperately want to believe that big problems are overblown or nonexistent. Whenever a group of people 'desperately wants to believe' something, there will always be someone willing to tell them what they want to hear, whether the opportunists are charlatans or simply nutjobs."

Bite"If ten people told you your house was on fire, you would call the fire department. You wouldn’t really care whether some of them thought that the place would be incinerated in an hour and some of them thought it would take a whole day."—Elizabeth Kolbert.

BiteAll scientists are skeptics. The motto of UK's 350-year-old Royal Society is 'Nullius in verba,' Latin for "On the words of no one" or "take nobody's word for it." It is "an expression of its enduring commitment to empirical evidence as the basis of knowledge about the natural world."

BiteQuestion: "What is the single most important piece of evidence supporting global warming theory?"
Answer: "What is the single strand that is most important in holding a rope together? Finding one single strand that can be cut to break the rope is very unlikely."
— Dr. Richard Alley

Bite"The evidence for climate change is not a house of cards, where you take one piece out and the whole theory falls apart. It's more like a mountain. Scrape a handful of pebbles off the top, but the mountain is still there."

Bite97 of 100 doctors recommend quick action to correct your child's serious abnormalities revealed by tests. One doctor says the child seems healthy, it could be a natural, so 'wait and see.'
"Now, suppose you're the parent. What would you do?"

BiteImagine your radiologist pointing to a spot on your lung x-ray, which several top oncologists have agreed shows cancer.. Would you say, 'I don't believe in surgery. So that can't possibly be a tumor'?

Bite100 years ago, Titanic's Captain Smith steamed ahead full speed, despite iceberg warnings. By time the fatal 'berg was visible, it was too late to turn the big ship. Today, the looming hazard is global warming. Will we heed the warnings in time to change course?

BiteSome skeptics conflate 'uncertainty' with 'ignorance'. This is the idea that because scientists are uncertain about some aspect [of climate science] they therefore know nothing about [that aspect], and any estimate of it is mere guesswork.

BiteScience denial and politicization occurs whenever some influential group sees a new discovery as threatening to their worldview, values, status or income. Not unique to climate science, this has been going on for centuries.

Bite"I really, really deplore the politicisation and polarisation of this issue" [global warming]. "There are these increasingly unprincipled attempts to polarise the science when the science is fact—like the sky is blue, the grass is green and the temperature of our planet is increasing." —Katharine Ha...

BiteClimate change is like one of those Hollywood disaster movies that pit obstructionists against ordinary people who become heroes. Those movies often end with a kiss. We don't know how the climate change story will end—will our grandchildren enjoy some end-of-movie kisses?

Bite"The one thing we know in science and life in general is that we can't just throw out the data we don't like just because we don't like it." – Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist at Texas Tech University.